Peter Clenott

The New Guardians: Policing in America's Communities for the 21st Century embodies nearly forty years of experience in law enforcement in addition to a career in clinical psychology. In search of a better way to police our nation, Dr. Cedric L. Alexander takes us back some 200 years to the Constitution-and then some 2,400 to Plato's Republic-and shows us how to remodel the warrior cop into the Guardian at the heart of community policing. Amid today's explosion of homicide in our most-challenged neighborhoods and the bid of international terrorism for the allegiance of marginalized youth everywhere, healing wounded relations between the police and the people has never been more urgent. This is the story of one man's quiet, courageous leadership. Cedric L. Alexander entered law enforcement in 1977, as a deputy sheriff in Leon County, Florida, on the brink of profound transformations in America and American policing. In many cities, the nation was in civil war, the police on one side, the community on the other. Wars are about winning by inflicting defeat. As a young deputy, Alexander saw that unending combat was destroying police-community relations. He devoted the next four decades to creating something new and something better. His background combines a long career as a deputy, a police officer, and a detective in the Tallahassee area, in Orlando, and in Miami-Dade, Florida, with a career in clinical psychology, both as a practitioner and an assistant professor at the University of Rochester (New York). He holds a Doctorate of Clinical Psychology from Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) and provided senior-level administrative and clinical leadership of mental health services within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, with special emphasis on counseling police officers, firefighters, and their families. He served as Deputy Chief and then as Chief of Police of the Rochester Police Department and subsequently was appointed Deputy Commissioner in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services before joining the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as Federal Security Director for Dallas/ Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). In 2013, Dr. Alexander was appointed Chief of Police for DeKalb County and, at the end of the year, became Deputy Chief Operating Officer/Public Safety Director. About the Author Cedric L. Alexander, Psy.D., is Director of Public Safety and Deputy Chief Operating Officer, DeKalb County Office of Public Safety, responsible for leading the Police and Fire Departments in the second-largest county in the metro-Atlanta area. He has served as President of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) and was appointed in 2015 to the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Dr. Alexander has appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, CBS Evening News, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, and NBC Nightly News, and has have written numerous opinion editorials for CNN, for which he is an on-air Law Enforcement Analyst.